Damian McBride's tome is coming

Damian McBride is doing a media round today that will include facing Andrew Neil on the Daily Politics later. He gets full marks for submitting himself to the most dangerous interviewers. Last night in Brighton dinners were finished early and tellies turned up for his opening appearance on Newsnight.

It had great potential for interview violence: Paxman and an audience. But Mr McBride sailed through, largely by admitting everything, accepting every criticism, and offering himself for any further punishment his enemies might have in mind. All, that is, except the money: he refused an audience invitation to donate his fee from the Mail (reportedly around £130-150k) to the Labour party. His answer was matter-of-fact: he left government with nothing except debt, the cash will go towards paying them off. Apart from that he agreed he was despicable, and ashamed. His apology not just to those he targeted but particularly to the innocents caught in the crossfire – the special advisers and civil servants – looked and sounded sincere. To the Tories calling for him to be investigated by the police and have his pension stripped he put his hands up: it's a matter for others (if anyone has any sense no more time will be wasted on that).

Where he was less convincing, or rather where his critics will be particularly sceptical, is his motivation for publication. He had the good grace to admit publishing in a party conference wasn't ideal, but Labour members will point out that he could have chosen not to publish at all. There will be speculation about which organisation offered to double his money if he held off publication until April 2015 to maximise damage to the Labour party. The (repeatable) Blairite view is that Mr McBride was never of the party, and therefore has no understanding of what loyalty to it entails. Mr McBride argues that he wants the party to avoid the factionalism and poison he embodied. He noted that his book had prompted the Shadow Cabinet to pledge never to brief against others (let's see how long that holds). His film for Newsnight though was too much of a plug for the two Eds and overlooked the tensions between the two. In fact, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Mr McBride's capacity to analyse Labour's position – and its recent history – with any lucidity is blinkered by his loyalty to Mr Balls, a loyalty that has hardly been repaid in public: if he wants to put it all behind him, then he should no longer allow himself to be trashed by his hero. The most telling line, for my money, came when he was asked about Gordon Brown. Do his revelations reflect on him, he was asked? "Ultimately it does, because I was employed by him." If you haven't yet, you can see what happened when we asked the former PM about Mr McBride in New York yesterday. From today we all get a chance to read the book and judge for ourselves.